Tech news picked on 2026-03-24
$300 Million Delve Scandal: The Pitfalls of Compliance Outsourcing
- Insight Partners deleted Delve's investment promotional materials amid allegations of audit forgery.
- Delve denies the accusations, but relying solely on the fact that a famous investment firm invested to entrust security operations is unsettling.
- When choosing an outsourcing company, it's easy to verify client lists or investment history, but it's easy to overlook whether you can actually review your company's audit evidence directly.
- I also want to ask if the records can be reviewed when changing vendors.
- Mashup Ventures created a new AI partner position and recruited partner Yang Seong-min.
- They are building agents for investment review and operations, and also introducing an intrapreneurship program. It raises curiosity whether product evaluations will be shared with investors as well.
- For teams seeking their first investor, it's worth asking not only about the materials to pass screening but also which product hypotheses can be validated together.
ArtBlood Aims to Manufacture Blood in Factories
- ArtBlood, developing ex-vivo red blood cell production technology, has been selected for the '2026 Supergap Startup Project.'
- Funding to continue research is welcome, but the key issue is whether the blood can be reliably mass-produced at hospital-grade quality.
- In biotech startups, attention focuses more on how far the costly verification during clinical and production stages can be completed than on the total amount of grants.
YC-Backed Company Stops Demo Amid Fake Audit Evidence Allegations
- Delve has halted its demo after allegations surfaced that it provided fake audit evidence.
- Teams rushing to get security certifications might find quick completion attractive, but you can't be certain that actual security controls are functioning just from a completion screen.
- When choosing automation vendors, I want to ask if you can verify who the auditor was and on what records the audit was approved.
- Ultimately, the team selling the product is the one who will have to explain to customers if problems arise.
Snowflake Gathers Developers Through a Hackathon
- Snowflake Korea is hosting Hackathon 2026, divided into tech and business tracks.
- It will be useful for teams looking to save time on infrastructure setup using Cortex AI and Streamlit to quickly validate customer responses.
- If you participate, it's advisable to first note down the problems to verify in the demo and the scope to delegate to the platform.
- After acquiring customers, transferring core data and logic might take more time than initially saved.
An Attempt to Complete Everything from Company Establishment to Investment at One Stop
- Codebox and Alphabrothers have opened a corporate operations support center that assists from company establishment to HR and investment attraction.
- It's appealing that this can reduce the time of searching for a place to outsource each task during the early startup phase.
- However, shareholders' registries and HR records need to be explainable by the founder during investment, so I will also look at whether the company can directly check and retrieve these records along with the scope of agency services.
- The four major financial holding companies in Korea have designated senior new businesses as a core task in their business reports.
- Competing with financial firms that have already built customer networks and trust, starting from customer acquisition, would be a heavy burden for small teams.
- It is worth examining approaches that target specific inconveniences of seniors, like those of Tokbi and Cheongyeon.
- I would like to compare the costs of directly acquiring customers with the outcomes that can be presented when proposing partnerships to financial firms.
Sloke Selected for the 1st Batch of the Deep Tech Startup Academy
- Sloke, developing an AI decision-making engine, has been selected for the 1st batch of the Deep Tech Startup Academy by the Ministry of SMEs and Startups.
- The process of preparing for French innovation certification and establishing a U.S. corporation shows the early team's approach to overseas expansion.
- Although support and certification can ease initial meetings, whether customers entrust actual business decisions is another matter, so it will be important to see if local customers consistently use the service.
The Significance of the $35 Million Fund Backed by CEOs of Kalshi and Polymarket
- The CEOs of rival companies Kalshi and Polymarket have jointly invested in 5(c) Capital, a fund worth $35 million.
- This is an opportunity to also examine businesses that sell data refinement or operational tools outside of trading platforms.
- However, it is premature to expect domestic customers to spend similarly just based on the increase in trading volume in the US.
- If starting in Korea, I want to specifically ask who would buy the data and for what kind of work they would use it.
A Company with $2.7 Million ARR Per Person Acquires Another Company
- Swedish AI coding startup Lovable has started acquiring startups.
- Teams running developer tools might consider acquisition or partnership as options, but if the leading company decides it's better to develop in-house, negotiations become difficult.
- For Korean teams, issues that are cumbersome to solve directly, like local payments, service integration, and security, might be areas where the other party is willing to pay to save time.
The Future of AI Infrastructure Breaking NVIDIA Dependence
- Glimlet Labs raised $80 million with technology that runs AI inference simultaneously on chips from multiple companies like NVIDIA and AMD.
- Being able to choose which chip to use is welcome, but there is a risk of being tied again to the software that manages the connections.
- If we consider adoption, we will look beyond the list of supported chips to see if moving our service workloads reduces both processing costs and operational time.
Lessons for Deep Tech Founders from Helion and OpenAI's Power Contract
- Sam Altman is stepping down as chairman of Helion's board ahead of a power purchase agreement between OpenAI and Helion.
- Securing a large customer willing to buy power that hasn't yet been produced provides a basis to raise funds needed for long development periods.
- This is a path to consider when founding deep tech startups, but even with purchase commitments, founders need to calculate separately how long they can sustain delays in commercialization.